Sondheim revamped with a gender bender twist
YET another old show has been warmed up with gender bending. Company, a 1970 musical comedy by Stephen Sondheim and George Furth, originally described the Manhattan japes of a bed-hopping heterosexual bachelor, aged 35, and his reluctant contemplation of marriage.
But we can’t have men behaving like that nowadays. Director Marianne Elliott has therefore switched the whole thing round and turned male lead Bobby into career woman Bobbie. The story is now set in the 21st century and the various married couples have also been chopped and changed.
It is all quite clever and – given that the original storyline is now probably too politically incorrect to stage – it allows a new generation of audiences to experience this early Sondheim.
In places the score is evocative of Burt Bacharach, with less of the melodic stopand-start found in later Sondheim.
Songs include the title number Company, Someone Is Waiting and a patter song, Getting Married Today, which is done brilliantly by Jonathan Bailey.
In the original version this song belongs to a fiancee on her wedding day. Here it is a gay man having pre-marriage jitters in his kitchen.
It becomes the evening’s show- stealer, complete with a singing priest who keeps popping out from the fridge and from the kitchen worktop with a wedding-cake hat. Tremendous hoot.
Other moments, particularly in the first 45 minutes, are perilously slow. My eyelids started to droop.
Former TV Bake-Off host Mel Giedroyc is in a busy cast – she plays a middle-aged wife who is trying to lose weight, one of several friends who urge Bobbie to settle down but whose own married lives are not exactly blissful.
The episodic nature of the story keeps the action varied and Patti LuPone shows her vocal chops with the song The Ladies Who Lunch. She rather shows up some of the other singers.
Bobbie herself is an under-written character. Rosalie Craig, who could almost be Sarah Jessica Parker’s twin, turns in a trim central performance; but it is hard to make much emotional investment in her romantic quandary, not least because marriage is less of a must-do these days than it was in New York half a century ago.
For its snappy production values, for Getting Married Today and for the walnutveneered luxury of Miss LuPone’s presence, as well as the inventiveness of the gender switching, it’s just about a four-star evening. But a show to admire rather than love.